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Former founding Googler and Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Meyer raised
eyebrows last year when she abruptly cut off telecommuting
opportunities for Yahoo employees. The tech world was aghast.
Telecommuting had long been championed by forward-looking
business leaders as a way to build employee loyalty and improve
productivity. Could everyone be wrong? Maybe, maybe not.

A new study by Stanford professor Nicholas
Bloom and graduate student James Liang shows that answering
the question is more complicated than merely stating that
telecommuting is always helpful or always harmful.
While Ctrip, the China-focused online travel company
studied by Bloom and Liang, enjoyed substantial benefits as a
result of telecommuting, Yahoo’s circumstances were different
and may have required a different approach, Bloom pointed out.

Time shift advantage. While my
observations are not as academically rigorous as Bloom and
Liang's study, I am seeing the benefits firsthand of working
remotely now that I have moved from Salt Lake City to Hong Kong
for MWI, the online marketing firm I founded. Although
I saw occasional spurts in my productivity on those occasions I
telecommuted from across town while working for the U.S.
headquarters in Salt Lake City, since relocating in Hong Kong I
have experienced a sharp increase in my output.

These days I’ve been able to keep my hand active in U.S.
operations, write for publications, manage a live event series
here in Hong Kong, blog three times a week,
attend various meetings throughout each week, train for a
trail-running race and be involved with my family and the
community. I don’t say this to brag but to point out that I’m
able to get a lot more done here than I could when
telecommuting from a place in the same time zone as the main
office.

This would have come as no surprise to David Heinemeier Hansson
and Jason Fried, founders of Basecamp and authors of the book
Rework , which advocates
for a results-oriented work environment with a healthy dose of
telecommuting. Fried says the current work environment is
optimized for interruptions, not work. At work, people are
interrupted by meetings, co-workers, emails and phone calls.
The real work gets done early in the morning before anyone
else arrives or late at night once everyone has gone home. Any
work done during the day tends to be accomplished
inefficiently and with more errors, since it’s difficult for
an employee to focus.

Telecommuting only solves part of this problem. While working
from home reduces the likelihood that a co-worker will pop in to
chat about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, the
same question might be asked via email or a chat window. But even
legitimate interruptions, like an email from a client
asking when a project will be finished, are still interruptions
that decrease workplace productivity. People tend to see these as
unavoidable, but my move to Hong Kong proved to me they are
anything but.

Hong Kong’s time zone is, at least for half of the year, exactly
12 hours the opposite of New York's. This makes real-time
communication via phone, email or chat inconvenient at best. When
I worked in the United States, I would respond to all emails
almost immediately. I didn’t want to keep anyone waiting. But
that simply isn’t feasible when working in Hong Kong, since many
of the emails I receive come in at 3 a.m. Hong Kong time.

Fear of missing out. At first I was frightened
to go to sleep each night. What if something important happened
while I was sleeping, and it took me six hours to respond? What
if my team members forgot about me because I wasn’t instantly
available? What if I tweeted and nobody I knew was awake to
retweet it? Oh, the horror!

None of my fears materialized. Yes, from time to time important
things happened while I slept and I would have been able to
contribute better if I'd been awake like everyone else in the
States, but my partner and the rest of the team have been able to
manage just fine. In fact, it has forced them to step up and take
care of things in a way that has forged a better company. My team
members didn’t forget about me, and as for tweeting, thank
goodness for Buffer, which allows for scheduling ahead.

But not only did everything work out OK, I find myself getting
more work done. This is because each morning I can wake up and
work almost interruption free. Everyone else was asleep. I could
batch process a day’s worth of email in a half hour. I could
write articles like this without anyone poking a head in the door
to ask a “quick question.” Instead of having my train of thought
derailed every few minutes, I can complete tasks on my own
schedule, at a single go, eliminating the time I used to spend
getting back into a task multiple times.

As I have located clients in Hong Kong and work more for Asian
businesses instead of projects for U.S. headquarters, I’m finding
that my productivity is slipping a bit. That’s to be expected,
since I have successfully created a new set of interruptions
here. I often still work out of a home office and can wear my
slippers if I like.

Perhaps you should move across the world like I have, but keep
company headquarters where it’s at. It might be the best change
you can make to get more done.